Waking
by skyewardfitzsimmonsphilinda
Summary: Oliver. Felicity. Falling. Will be continued. Part 1 of the Spiritus Vitae series.
1. Waking

_Oliver Queen wakes abruptly, that odd feeling of falling jarring him awake. She's beside him. Of course she is. _

"Felicity," he murmurs sleepily, rolling over and reaching for her. Her skin is warm underneath his battered hands, and he closes the space between them quickly.

"Oliver," she whispers, and the sight of her in bed beside him takes his breath away. She is all bright eyes and messy golden hair and perfect perfect _perfect_ next to him. He pulls her into the arc of his body, inhaling her scent.

"I'm the luckiest man in the world."

She giggles disbelievingly and rolls closer.

"I'm serious," he whispers. "I spent five years on an island trying to get back home, and I spent the last two years wondering if home was even possible, and tonight… you… that's the only home for me."

Her expression softens into something that is almost sadness, and her fingers trace patterns on his chest, following the scars that cover his body and then swirling, lacing his skin with new patterns of her own. There are stars in her hands, and she traces the pattern of galaxies across his bare skin, and Oliver never wants this to end.

He smiles down at her, but his breath hitches in his throat as he look at her. _God_ she is breathtaking. "Do you remember how we ended up here the first time?" he asks her playfully. "It was after our first date, and we ended up down here drinking tequila and listening to the thunderstorm."

A mischievous smile played across her lips. "Of course I remember it," she said. "Before that, I had wondered, you know. If any of it was real. If I really meant that much to you."

His face falls slightly. "It was more real than I ever dared to admit," he said finally, running his fingers through her blond hair. "I think I loved you from the day I met you in the IT department at Queen Consolidated. And I loved you more every second I knew you."

"Is that why you chose my car to climb into after your mother shot you?"

He grinned ruefully. "I didn't know much then, but I knew I trusted you. It took me a lot longer to realize that the only reason I was so afraid of loving you was because I was just afraid of anything that involved vulnerability."

"I know," she said dryly. "You tried to do the whole Mr.-Ice-Man thing, and you sucked at it."

He grinned down at her. "I did kind of suck at it, didn't I?" he said. "But why did you stay, Felicity Smoak? I was such a mess."

She just smiled, twining her fingers through his with one hand, the other hand still idly trailing over his bare chest. "You were worth it," she said finally. "Every second. Even that damn gunshot wound."

"Do you remember the first time I brought you back to the manor?" Oliver reminisced. "I had just started working with you, and Thea took one look at you and basically decided she was keeping you."

"I remember her apologizing for what she called 'Ollie's general weirdness' as well as 'Ollie's island weirdness,'" Felicity told him. "And did you know that when Diggle was supposed to take me home after you and Tommy had left, I stayed because Thea was a mess and I was coming unraveled with stress and we did each other's nails and complained about you all night long? And we talked about boys. Lots of boys."

Oliver laughed, pulling her closer with one arm. "Of course you did," he said. "I should have known from the way Thea talked about you. She looked up to you even more than she looked up to Laurel back then. I think you were the only thing she regretted leaving behind when she left Starling City."

Felicity reached a gentle hand towards his face, her expression soft. "Don't say that," she said softly. "She loves you, too. And she hasn't forgotten that you're her brother. She'll come around."

Oliver smiled a little sadly. "Have you talked to her?"

"A few times."

"Is she happy?"

"Yes."

"Safe?"

Felicity grinned slightly. "Yes," she said after a minute. "Safe and a little wild. But she has someone looking out for her."

"When you talked… did she mention me?"

"Yes," Felicity said.

"And?"

"She told me a few unrepeatable words to say to you, and then said to tell you she's happy where she is," Felicity admitted bluntly. "And then she asked if you had finally taken me on a date."

He grinned at that one. Thea had told him once, with a certainty that he had not understood at the time, that he would never, ever deserve Felicity Smoak.

(It was true. He wouldn't.)

"Do you remember when we told Sara that we were dating?" It was Felicity's turn to reminisce, and she grinned at the memory. "She was leaving with Nyssa and she squealed when I told her. I would have thought squealing would be outlawed in the vigilante handbook or something."

"No one makes rules for Sara," Oliver said, grinning wryly. "She liked you a lot, you know. She said that she and I were bad for each other. We brought out the darkest side of one another. And you… you were the one we looked to when we needed to find our way back. She always told me that if I didn't ask you out soon, she was going to just have to ask you out herself."

"How do you know she didn't?" Felicity grinned wolfishly, a glint in her eye as she looked up at him.

"No," Oliver said incredulously. "How did I not know about this?"

Felicity's grin widened. "It was more of a one-night thing," she admitted, laughing at the look on his face. "She had been teaching me some self-defense—basic escapes and a few strikes—and then she started practicing on the salmon ladder and I just watched and when she came down…things happened."

He sat up straight in bed, laughing incredulously. "Damn," he said. "I'm a little impressed. You've taken on two vigilantes."

"And they've both lived to tell the tale," Felicity teased, and he rolled over her, tickling her until she was giggling uncontrollably. She rolled in closer, and then pressed her lips against his jaw, trapping his hands in hers.

Her face softened, became serious, almost a little sad. "Oh, Oliver," she whispered. "I have been so lucky to love you. I wish this didn't have to end."

A vague, panic-ridden memory began surfacing at the back of his mind. Why—why would she say that? "It doesn't," he insisted loudly. "It doesn't have to end. Ever."

Felicity shook her head sadly. "Oh, Oliver," she said again, and her voice was soft and sad as every brief rainstorm they had listened to together, as every thrush call on that lonely hellish island—

"You know how it ends," she whispers, and there are tears in his eyes why are there tears in his eyes why is she looking at him like that—

"It's time for her to go," another voice says, and Oliver jerks around.

The lair is darker suddenly, the lights going out all around them, and Tommy is standing there. Tommy. Why is Tommy there and why does Oliver hear someone screaming (and _oh god it's him screaming and he doesn't know why doesn't know doesn't know_) and why, _why_ is there blood soaking the front of Felicitiy's thin white nightdress?

"Goodbye, Oliver," she says softly, and Oliver Queen wakes screaming.

Diggle is standing over him, shaking his shoulder, and the memory that nagged at Oliver during his dream is real it is real it should not be real.

"The funeral starts in fifteen minutes," Diggle says gently, and Sara and Nyssa are there behind him, their eyes swollen with grief.

But it's not real it can't be real Felicity was in his arms just a breath ago, and _dear god_ when did waking begin to feel so much like falling?

She took a bullet for him.

That was how it had ended.

A bullet to her gut, to her side, and then to her heart.

(God, how he craved that bullet for himself, craved it greedily and mercilessly. This was worse than starving, and he had spent five years learning what starving felt like).

The funeral is quiet.

Thea isn't there.

Oliver wonders if she knows.

Sara and Nyssa hold each other, and Roy is there with Sin, and they hold onto each other and weep as if they do not know how to stop. Diggle and Lyla are red-eyed and silent and broken, and they hold onto each other, too.

But Oliver says nothing.

Does not cry.

(He says nothing, so why does he still feel like he's screaming?)

They leave him alone after the funeral, give him the space he needs.

So he stays there.

In the cold, in the rain, in front of her tombstone.

_Felicity Smoak_, engraved in rigid letters across the cold granite.

He sits there, cross-legged, his hand tracing the cold, cold letters of the tombstone.

"Felicity," he murmurs, and his voice is broken as he traces his fingers over the words on the gravestone. The earth is damp and rich, and he hates how the ground next to him is newly turned. "For one beautiful year, I was the luckiest man in the world."

He waits.

He waits—for what, he does not know—but perhaps part of him is waiting for an answer. Waiting to add more memories to that golden, golden year when she was in his arms.

It was a breath, and she is gone.

And in the emptiness as he waits for a voice he will never hear again, Oliver Queen realizes that he has never been surrounded by so much silence.


	2. Vita

_Spiritus Vitae_

_Shēnghuó Qìxí _

Felicity Smoak is floating.

It's dark, it's dark everywhere, but at least the pain's gone. Her gut, her side, her heart.

She remembers the bullets.

Remembers Oliver's scream.

If she knows him (and she does), he probably didn't stop screaming for a long, long time.

Is this what death feels like?

If this is death, it kinda sucks. And Oliver—_her_ Oliver—what will he do? She has seen him lost before, and she knows it will be worse now.

But how does she know this, if she is dead?

She was supposed to die.

She knew that when she stepped in front of a bullet.

So where is she? Is this an afterlife of some sort?

"Felicity."

Someone is calling her.

Who could be calling her?

She is dead.

She is gone.

Oliver is mourning her.

Three gunshots.

A blast, pain, so much pain, and falling.

And it was finished.

Or so she thought.

"Felicity."

The voice is insistent.

"Oliver?"

"No." The voice is gentle. "Do you remember what happened?"

Felicity opened her eyes. The room was dark.

So dark.

"Am I dead?"

"No," the voice said softly. "You are just beginning to live."

"Why?" she asked.

It took effort, so much effort, just to speak. She was tired, so tired, and she wanted Oliver and—

"Why are you alive?" the voice—a man's voice—asked. "Or why are you here?"

"Both," Felicity groaned.

"As for the first," the man said, stepping into the dim light by her bedside. "You are alive because I saved you."

"Fuck," Felicity swore, her vision swaying just slightly. "M—Malcolm Merlyn? Why?"

"Yes," he said. "And as to your second question…well, my daughter would be the reason I brought you here."

And the last thing Felicity Smoak saw before she lost consciousness again was Thea Queen standing at her bedside, her face etched with so much gritty despair that it broke Felicity's heart.


End file.
